Since the onset of the modern police department in the early 18th Century, specialized law enforcement units have been formed to deal with various aspects of maintaining public order. From mounted police to riot squads to SWAT teams, the nature and number of specialized law enforcement units vary with the needs of the jurisdiction. In the face of several highly publicized crisis incidents in the early 1990's, the FBI formed the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) to handle crises such as hostage or siege situations.
The CIRG, as a part of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch of the FBI, serves to bring together a spectrum of resources from a wide variety of FBI Sections. Consequently, the CIRG encompasses investigative, tactical, intelligence, surveillance, and operational functions to provide immediate response from law enforcement authorities in critical incidents.
Following the example of the FBI, most local law enforcement agencies have established their own critical incident response teams. Although these teams take many different forms, the typical procedures in critical incident management take on the same general form. In order to resolve a critical incident, a law enforcement agency sets up an “operation” involving various law enforcement officers and one or more supervisors (critical incident operation commanders). The commander generally remains in one location, while the officers are dispersed to various locations in order to carry out different actions and eventually resolve the critical incident. The commander receives feedback from the officers and uses the feedback information to make relevant decisions regarding the critical incident operation. Communication between the commander and the officers generally takes place in person, over dedicated radiofrequency communication devices, or over terminal devices connected to public voice and/or data communication networks.
A critical incident is an inherently stressful and complex situation, and critical incident response teams include a relatively large number of responders. Critical incident response teams often involve interagency collaboration, which means that the commander must coordinate efforts among personnel not necessarily accustomed to working with one another on a regular basis. These factors increase the risk for miscommunication during times when precise and well-coordinated effort is critical. Unfortunately, there are no special tools in the art for assisting a Critical Incident Operation commander in processing the information received from the officers, and in delivering comprehensive and structured instructions to the officers. In fact, normally, the commander simply carries a paper pad and pen, and takes notes while providing instructions and receiving feedback to and from his subordinate officers.
Accordingly, there is an established need for a readily transportable system and method for facilitating the management of law enforcement critical incident operations that will allow a Critical Incident Operation commander to disseminate instructions in an efficient, clearly understandable, and documentable fashion, and to rapidly process feedback from the officers, allowing to make faster and more documented decisions.